When I first became a Biofield Tuning practitioner, I was surprised to see the level at which my clients’ biofields were carrying the frequency of their parents’ emotional state. This pattern made sense with my clients who are Projectors (Human Design), because they have open energy centres that naturally absorb the energy of the people around them. However, I’ve also found this pattern with clients who have defined (or closed) energy centres. This pattern also made sense for clients whose mothers’ emotions were in their field, especially in the early developmental years, because their nervous systems were attuned to their mother’s nervous systems en vitro. However, this doesn’t explain why the father’s emotions are found in the field, nor does it explain how a parent’s emotions are found in their field during the ages after the early developmental years.
The missing link can be found in the therapeutic concept of projective identification.
To understand what projective identification is, first I have to explain the theory of mentalisation. Mentalisation is defined as the mental process through which a person interprets their own actions and those of others as meaningful, based on intentional mental states like desires, needs, feelings, beliefs, and reasons, both in an implicit and explicit manner (Bateman & Fonagy, 2010). The concept of mentalisation describes how humans effectively navigate through and make sense of the social world, in addition to fostering the development of a rich and stable sense of self (Choi-Kain & Gunderson, 2008).
According to Fonagy and Allison (2011), mentalisation has several development phases. Between six to 12 months, children can understand the cause-and-effect relationships between actions, the individuals performing them, and the environment. At around nine months, children can interpret actions based on the other person’s underlying intentions and select the most efficient way to achieve a goal from various options. Around the age of two, children have not yet learned to distinguish between internal and external experiences. However, an internal language develops along with the ability to reason about others’ feelings and desires. Between the ages of three and four, children begin conceptualising that other people’s actions are a result of their beliefs. Around the age of four, children’s ability to mentalise takes a huge leap. They begin to conceptualise that their emotional reactions are influenced by their current mood or a previous event and become more empathic to others. They begin to interact socially with jokes and start to bond with other children through humour and shared interests. By the time children reach the age of six, they begin to understand what it means to tell a white lie, what it means to be in a conflict, and what it means to make a mistake about a belief that they held.
In an interview on the Anna Freud YouTube channel (2015, 4:46), Fonagy shares that when a parent mirrors a child’s feelings, the child learns to organise their emotions based on external cues. He explains how this sense of organisation contributes to their experience of themselves as mental beings. However, in the absence of secure early attachments, the ability to mentalise does not develop adequately (Choi-Kain & Gunderson, 2008). A caregiver who has experienced abuse can lose the ability to mentalise if the infant’s distress becomes a trigger for them (Fonagy & Allison, 2011). Escalations of fear, anger, shame, defensiveness, and indifference all decrease the caregiver’s capacity to mentalise with their child (The Menninger Clinic, 2013).
When children cannot find an image of themselves in the caregiver’s mind that aligns with their own beliefs, feelings, and intentions, they often become hypervigilant about the caregiver’s behaviour, using all the cues available for prediction. While hyper-mentalisation becomes evident externally, the ability to mentalise and self-organize internally becomes compromised (Fonagy et al., 2002). Failure to develop a substantial mentalising capacity leads to issues with affect regulation, self-control, and the ability to concentrate (Fonagy et al., 2018). If the child experiences neglect and abuse, the perpetrator’s mental state can be internalised as an alien part of the self. This results in experiencing a part of their own mind as insufferable. If the pain from this experience is turned inward, it can lead to self-harm, drug abuse, or alcohol abuse. If the pain from this experience is turned outward, it can lead to projective identification (Fonagy & Allison, 2011).
To understand how projective identification works, I next have to explain the theory of true self and false self. Winnicott’s developmental model has three phases that contribute to the human maturation process (Palombo et al., 2009). The Phase of Absolute Dependence is from birth to 3-6 months old. Winnicott believes that during this phase, the infant is an inseparable unit from the mother, and he teaches the importance of the mother creating a holding environment for the infant to learn the difference between self and others. During this phase, the infant can experience, and subconciously hold, the caregivers emotions as their own. The Phase of Relative Dependence begins once the infant can differentiate themselves from their mothers. Using a transitional object, such as a blanket or a stuffed animal, assists with this developmental task in addition to catalysing symbolic thinking and creative processes (Abrahams & Rohleder, 2021). Winnicott also considered play as an essential ingredient for the child’s self-development during this period (Palombo et al., 2009). The Phase Toward Independence begins when the infant develops intellectual understanding and confidence in the environment (Winnicott, 1987).
Winnicott sees the baby as a creative being who desires the freedom to act spontaneously and actively make gestures that enhance their understanding of their inner and outer world (Tuber, 2020). Within the second phase, The Phase of Relative Dependence, the infant’s true self and false self are established. In this phase, the baby starts to sense its mother’s moods. When adequate holding environment is provided through development, it creates an opportunity for the child to adopt an authentic sense of aliveness and vitality, referred to as the true self (Palombo et al., 2009). Winnicott acknowledged that the mother cannot always be perfectly available, as she is expected to be tired, frustrated, and preoccupied sometimes. He also states that not all impingements to the holding environment are bad and that a small amount can aid in developing the baby’s ego (Abrahams & Rohleder, 2021). However, if the mother is not good enough, meaning not meeting the child’s needs 30% of the time (Johnson, 2021), and if the holding environment becomes inadequate due to intrusiveness or neglect, the baby is likely to form a false self as a result from accommodating and responding to environmental demands rather than from inner spontaneity.
While some degree of false self is unavoidable, too much false self leads to a life lived not for oneself but for others (Abrahams & Rohleder, 2021). In other words, when babies hide themself for protection and only show what their mother wants to see because their needs appear to be unacceptable or unmanageable, their spontaneous development gets interrupted, and they become compliant (Exploring Your Mind, 2018). This conformity serves as a protection from feeling disappointed and inadequate (Depth Counseling, 2024). The true self remains empty, or hollow, if it is not recognised and validated for its own creative expressions. Later in life, this can lead to dependency upon a caregiver or a need to seek out influential people to merge with in an effort to adopt their strengths and ideals. Often, limitations of the true self only become realised if the individual’s lack of authenticity and creativity are challenged, such as in therapy or in an interpersonal relationship (Fonagy & Target, 2006). As children grow, any success they achieve while being led by their false self will lead to unhappiness or despair. Even if others see value in their success, they can only feel the value if it is achieved by their true self (Exploring Your Mind, 2018). The degrees at which the true self and false self form vary from a wide range of being polite in social settings to having a psychotic illness (Winnicott, 1987).
Following is an example to help put this all together:
Sara was raised by a mother who was unable to emotionally regulate. Her mother had an explosive anger and a deep fear of rejection, stemming from her upbringing. Sara learned as an infant to present her false self because compliance was necessary to mitigate her mother’s anger, so her needs could be met.
Sara then married Sam, who’s parents separated when he was a toddler. Sam was raised soley by his father, who also had a deep fear of rejection. While Sam was growing up, his father regularly engaged in affairs, outside of committed relationships.
Sara reached a point during her marriage where she felt lost, even though she had achieved much success in life. With the help of a therapist, she was able to identify that she had been operating as her false self.
As Sara began to interact as her true self, Sam experienced her lack of compliance as betrayal. He was externalising the unwanted mental states he internalised from his father. He was carrying the betrayal that his father engaged in, and subconsiously used projective identification to place the betrayal onto Sara to resolve.
Additionally, Sara’s mother experienced her lack of compliance as rejection. Her mother was externalising the unwanted mental states of her father, Sara’s grandfather, stemmed from the rejection he felt from his father. Sara’s mother was carrying the rejection that her father engaged in, and subconsiously used projective identification to place the rejection onto Sara to resolve.
All of the anger from betrayal and rejection in Sara’s biofield was never her’s to carry. They were not her energetic imprints to resolve. This is the beauty of Biofield Tuning. Finding the frequencies in her field where projective identification was held allowed Sara the opportunity to shift the energetic imprints that did not belong to her, and aliven the frequency of her true, authentic self, resulting in a heightened sense of creativity and spontaneity.
My theory is that people who engage in projective identification operate from their false self. They do this subconsciously because they are unable to hold the unresolved trauma (which is often generational) within themselves, so they project it onto someone else. Their target is usually someone who is empathic. The empathetic person is manipulated to feel like they have done something wrong, and it’s their responsibility to fix it.
This explains why it is essential for us to mentalise with each other, especially our children. To be attuned to another, we must first be attuned to our inner selves and the self that we present to the world around us, as authentically as possible. We can achieve this by claiming all the parts of ourselves we do not like, taking responsibility for them, and embracing all the parts we love. We also have to see all parts of ourselves that we are holding that never belonged to us. Thus is the journey of reclamation. It is often complex and messy, even heartbreaking at times, but it’s the only path to freedom.
Additionally, here are a few short video’s that also explain how Projective Identification works:
References
Abrahams, D., & Rohleder, P. (2021). A clinical guide to psychodynamic psychotherapy. Routledge. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/AUT/detail.action?docID=6468481
AMBIT.tv. (2017, October 22). Introducing mentalising for ambit (longer version) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCqrgQSe2MY&t=629s
Anna Freud. (2015, March 12). Peter Fonagy, Anna Freud Centre Chief Executive: What is Mentalization? Interview [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHw2QumRPrQ&t=7s
Bateman, A., & Fonagy, P. (2010). Mentalization based treatment for borderline personality disorder. World Psychiatry, 9(1), 11–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2051-5545.2010.tb00255.x
Choi-Kain, L. W., & Gunderson, J. G. (2008). Mentalization: Ontogeny, assessment, and application in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(9), 1127–1135. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07081360
Donald Winnicott and his theory about the false self. Exploring Your Mind. (2018, July 26). https://exploringyourmind.com/donald-winnicott-and-his-theory-about-the-false-self/
Dr. D.W. Winnicott: The True & False Self. Depth Counseling. (2024, April 13). https://depthcounseling.org/blog/winnicott-true-false-self
Duschinsky, R., & Foster, S. (2021). Mentalizing in development. Mentalising and Epistemic Trust, 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1093/med-psych/9780198871187.003.0004
Fonagy, P. (2018). Attachment theory and psychoanalysis. Routledge. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/AUT/detail.action?docID=5358499
Fonagy, P., & Allison, E. (2011). What is Mentalization? A Concept and its Foundations in Development. London; University College London. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1430329/7/Fonagy_chapter1_draft_pfrevised_protected.pdf
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization and the development of the self. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aut/reader.action?docID=5358627
Fonagy, P., Luyten, P., Allison, E., & Campbell, C. (2018). Reconciling Psychoanalytic Ideas with Attachment Theory. London; University College London. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1468808/1/Fonagy_Reconciling%20Psychoanalytic.pdf
Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (2006). Psychoanalytic theories: Perspectives from developmental psychopathology. Whurr Publishers.
Johnson, P. (2021, August 6). Good enough parenting. Forest for the Trees Perinatal Psychology. https://forestpsychology.com.au/good-enough-parenting/
Morrison, J. (2023, September 20). Everything You Need To Know About Mentalization And Children’s Development. Catch Therapy. https://www.catchpsychotherapy.org/allposts/2020/8/18/why-mentalization-is-a-key-skill-for-parents-teachers-and-children
Palombo, J., Koch, B. J., & Bendicsen, H. K. (2009). Guide to Psychoanalytic Developmental Theories. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. https://ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/login?url=https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-0-387-88455-4
The Menninger Clinic. (2013, June 18). What is Mentalizing & Why Do It with Jon G. Allen, PhD. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLT7ieO3hTk&t=330s
Tuber, S. (2020). Attachment, play, and authenticity: Winnicott in a clinical context. Rowman & Littlefield. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/AUT/detail.action?docID=5624962
Winnicott, D. W. (1987). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. The Hogarth Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/AUT/detail.action?docID=5359366
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